Much of what directs organizational behavior lies below the surface. Individuals must reconcile organizational goals with their personal goals—often subconsciously. What drives the secret life of organizations? Evolutionary theory and personality psychology.
On episode 152 of The Science of Personality, Robert Hogan, PhD, founder and president of Hogan Assessments, discusses his newest book, Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations. The book represents the broadening of Dr. Hogan’s ideas on personality psychology to the highest level: the organization.
According to Dr. Hogan, “Leadership is the most important force in human affairs. Personality is the key to understanding leadership. That makes personality the most important topic in human affairs, full stop.”
The Origin of The Secret Life of Organizations
Dr. Hogan moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1982 to start a PhD program in industrial-organizational psychology (IO psychology) with a focus on personality. He found that traditional IO psychology textbooks were only a collection of topics without an intellectual theme. He wrote Personality and the Fate of Organizations1 as an antidote for that shortcoming.
His new book, Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations,2 encompasses the Hogan point of view on leadership. It begins with chimpanzee politics (more on this soon), then moves through individual personality, teams, and organizational theory. “Personality is an integral part of all those discussions, even when it’s not recognized as such,” Dr. Hogan said.
In the 1960s, mainstream academic textbooks assumed that personality and leadership were unimportant or even nonexistent. “I spent a good bit of my career early on trying to demonstrate that personality is real and consequential, leadership is real and consequential, and personality is associated with leadership,” said Dr. Hogan. Personality and the Secret Life of Organizations places organizational theory properly in the context of human prehistory, the rise of organizations, and political leadership, among other key concepts.
Chimpanzee Politics and Organizational Theory
To understand organizations, one must first understand human nature. Dr. Hogan uses chimpanzee politics to explain organizational behavior, drawing on evolutionary theory and animal behavior from Chimpanzee Politics3 to frame organizational theory. Chimpanzees are group-living animals, that is, they depend on their groups for individual survival and status.
Among chimpanzee males, there’s a clear hierarchy: an alpha male, subordinate males, and outcast males. The alpha male not only is the biggest and strongest but also has the most support of the group. Competition for the alpha role and its privileges is constant. “There’s a period of real chaos as the new alpha has to establish his right to rule,” said Dr. Hogan. “This is just like Washington, DC.”
Getting Along vs. Getting Ahead
“The principal dynamic in every organization is the individual search for power,” Dr. Hogan explained. However, it’s not socially acceptable to directly claim to have ambitious goals. In every organization (and chimpanzee troop), individuals are maneuvering for power and status. These multiple individual agendas create competition within the organization. Dr. Hogan expressed the inherent tension between the individual and the organization this way: “What’s good for you may or may not be good for your organization. What’s good for your organization is always good for you.”
People need groups for survival and for status. According to Dr. Hogan, the major task of leadership is to try to get individuals to align their personal agendas with the interests of the group. In other words, each of us has conflicting drives to cooperate with others in a group for survival (getting along) but also compete with others for status (getting ahead). The complexities of reconciling one’s need to be a part of the group with one’s self-promoting impulses inform the secret life of organizations. This tension produces two very different kinds of leaders: Dr. Hogan distinguishes emergent leaders, who win the competition for status, from effective leaders, who actually build teams that succeed.
Six Universal Themes Present in Organizations
That individual-versus-organization tension doesn’t stay contained at the individual level—it shapes the organization as a whole. Before describing the recurring patterns that result, Dr. Hogan traces why organizational theory was so slow to take personality seriously in the first place. According to Dr. Hogan, 19th- and 20th-century American psychology was dominated by behaviorism, which maintained that personality was largely irrelevant to explaining behavior. The principal claim of behaviorism is that people behave according to situational reinforcement—not, notably, because of personality characteristics. Psychologist Walter Mischel even held that there was no such thing as personality.4
In studying organizational theory, Dr. Hogan has observed six generalizations, or themes, that together shape organizational behavior.
- Organizations as pyramid schemes – From nonp
